Fast Focus
	Bidwell reaches out to younger entrepreneurs who live life online.
	Millions of dollars are available to fund new ideas.
	An online brainstorming session generated 45,000 hits and nearly 400 ideas.

Uncommon Inspiration

Chubb experiments with new forms of innovation using brokers and agents.

By  Ed Leefeldt

As a volunteer fire captain in a small town, Jon Bidwell puts out fires. As global innovation officer of the $13 billion Chubb Corp., he’s trying to light a few.

In June 2008, Bidwell was summoned to Chubb’s boardroom, where he got his new job and a mandate: Make change. Increase the speed and breadth of new ideas, bring more products to market sooner, and create transparency, so everyone from the CEO to the independent agent could see what is happening at the company.

The message from the board was marked urgent. “The future relevancy of our company depends on this,” he was told.

This would be a radical departure for “Old Man Chubb.” Founded in 1882 at New York harbor by Thomas Caldecot Chubb and his son Percy to write cargo insurance, Chubb’s annual report is punctuated with words like “conservative” and “stable,” which are often synonymous with “slow-moving.” Its oak-paneled executive suite with portraits of clipper ships and 18th century landscapes is far removed from the YouTube and Twitter world that younger people live in.

Percolate New Ideas

But Chubb knew it had to reach beyond its older executive clientele to the emerging entrepreneurs who live life online. As a high-end insurer, Chubb specializes in premium products and services, so it can’t compete on a commodity basis by undercutting the prices of others, especially direct insurers. Instead, Chubb needed to become an “idea factory,” where new ideas percolated up from the ranks rather than trickling down from the top. And it needed to do it in a hurry.

“Insurance is perceived as a slow-moving business,” says Bidwell. “But the cost of technology is declining and the speed of people getting into business is increasing. You’ve got to pick up on new ideas quickly.”

At first glance, Bidwell doesn’t look like the ideal candidate for this job. At 47 and with graying temples, he’s on the other side of the generation gap. He’s also a company lifer, part of the Chubb culture since 1983, when he started as a trainee in the unit that insures banks. But he learned fast when smaller banks were gobbled up by larger banks, which in turn became prey themselves in the twilight of the Glass-Steagall era. Bidwell was forced to “evolve or die” as he changed manager jobs, moving from Detroit to Philadelphia to New York.

In his new job, Bidwell runs lean and mean with a staff of only “three and a half,” hardly enough to run focus groups, conduct surveys and roundtables, write reports to the CEO, and wait for an answer—the “oh, no, not another meeting!” way of getting things done. But the seed money involved is sizeable. While Chubb isn’t writing any blank checks, the venture capital fund Bidwell works with has millions at its disposal to fund new ideas. As he puts it, “up to seven figures per idea and as many as prove out.”

In other words, he is a venture capitalist tucked into a big insurer. Why not borrow the structure and strategies of Silicon Valley, possibly the most successful idea factory the world has ever seen? He focused on Google, where employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their time being innovative.

Bidwell began by enlisting company employees, not only those under him, but his peers and those above him. This required a little finessing, a lot of social networking, and a good chunk of schmoozing. He got the backing of Chubb’s information technology department to adapt Web tools and even enlisted the company’s speechwriter to help with internal communications.